Political events of the past two years have delivered a more profound and devastating message: American democracy has been conclusively conquered by American capitalism. Government has been disabled or captured by the formidable powers of private enterprise and concentrated wealth. Self-governing rights that representative democracy conferred on citizens are now usurped by the overbearing demands of corporate and financial interests. Collectively, the corporate sector has its arms around both political parties, the financing of political careers, the production of the policy agendas and propaganda of influential think tanks, and control of most major media.

Calls are growing for a nationwide moratorium on home foreclosures following the recent revelations that major lenders may have committed fraud while forcing thousands of people out of their homes. On Thursday the White House announced President Obama will not sign a bill approved by Congress that could have made it easier for banks to foreclose. We discuss the latest in the foreclosure crisis with Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner. This week, Ohio filed a lawsuit accusing the lender Ally Financial and its GMAC Mortgage division of fraud in approving scores of foreclosures.

Next, there will some interesting decisions the banksters have to make, all centering around the question of how dirty do they want to fight. These debates won’t want to take place in public, but thanks to wikileaks and others we can expect more revelations like Bernie Marcus’ memorable appeal “to shoot” any business leader who does not oppose the Employee Free Choice Act. Of course, anyone like the Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner who tries to stop the foreclosures that are destroying neighborhoods will be accused of starting a “class war.” But asking for those who don’t oppose legislation to be shot isn’t inciting a class war, it is doing something truly noble.

Thirteen people died and hundreds were wounded last week in the African nation of Mozambique when police cracked down on a three-day protest over a 30 percent hike in the price of bread. The UN says the riots in Mozambique should be a wake-up call for governments that have ignored food security problems since the global food crisis of 2008, when countries around the world saw angry protests in the streets over the rising prices of basic food items. We speak with author and activist Raj Patel. [includes rush transcript]

This is really unsettling, an article at a major US newspaper (The Washington Post) that advocates killing Julian Assange, the founder of wikileaks. It is also filled with lies about Julian. I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t read it myself. There have been several organizations that advocated killing journalists, for example the Gestapo, and the NKVD/KBG , and Putin’s entourage. What august company Marc Thiessen is in:

Let’s be clear: WikiLeaks is not a news organization; it is a criminal enterprise. Its reason for existence is to obtain classified national security information and disseminate it as widely as possible — including to the United States’ enemies. These actions are likely a violation of the Espionage Act, and they arguably constitute material support for terrorism. The Web site must be shut down and prevented from releasing more documents — and its leadership brought to justice. WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, proudly claims to have exposed more classified information than all the rest of the world press combined. He recently told the New Yorker he understands that innocent people may be hurt by his disclosures (“collateral damage” he called them) and that WikiLeaks might get “blood on our hands.”

With his unprecedented release of more than 76,000 secret documents last week, he may have achieved this. The Post found that the documents exposed at least one U.S. intelligence operative and identified about 100 Afghan informants — often including the names of their villages and family members. A Taliban spokesman said the group is scouring the WikiLeaks Web site for information to find and “punish” these informers.

Beyond getting people killed, WikiLeaks’ actions make it less likely that Afghans and foreign intelligence services (whose reports WikiLeaks also exposed) will cooperate with the United States in the future. And, as former CIA director Mike Hayden has pointed out, the disclosures are a gift to adversary intelligence services, and they will place a chill on intelligence sharing within the United States government. The harm to our national security is immeasurable and irreparable.

And WikiLeaks is preparing to do more damage. Assange claims to be in possession of 15,000 even more sensitive documents, which he is reportedly preparing to release. On Sunday, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told ABC News that Assange had a “moral culpability” for the harm he has caused. Well, the Obama administration has a moral responsibility to stop him from wreaking even more damage.

Assange is a non-U.S. citizen operating outside the territory of the United States. This means the government has a wide range of options for dealing with him. It can employ not only law enforcement but also intelligence and military assets to bring Assange to justice and put his criminal syndicate out of business.Continue reading “Marc Thiessen in the Washington Post: “Kill Julian””→

BP will surely lose much more money than most analysts are predicting. The so-called responsible environmental movement is not very well connected to popular sentiment, which clearly has a long way to go. The Facebook group Boycott BP will easily be at 300,000 before tomorrow morning.

Web users dismayed by the BP oil leak are using Facebook and Twitter to channel outrage, organize cleanups, and poke fun at the public relations crisis facing the company behind the largest-ever U.S. spill.

A Facebook group called “Boycott BP,” which encourages people to stop using BP (BP) products, has drawn more than 250,000 fans. U.S. government agencies have set up pages on Facebook, Twitter, Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, and Yahoo!’s (YHOO) Flickr to field questions about the cleanup effort. An anonymously managed Twitter account that makes glib comments, purportedly on BP’s behalf, has more than 97,000 followers.

And then from the “please tell us what you really think” department is this gem:

Sheila Williams, a spokeswoman for London-based BP, says the company is monitoring sentiment on social media sites, although she says online outreach is a lower priority than containing the spill in the Gulf of Mexico. “Our view is that people are entitled to their views,” she says. “Our major area of concern is to try and control the leak.”

How quaint! BP still believes in the Freedom of the Press! Really?

And here is a quote from the Wanna bet? department:

Hayward reduced BP’s net debt ratio to 19 percent in the first quarter from 23 percent a year earlier, giving him greater ability to meet cleanup costs and related liabilities. The company has an AA credit rating from Standard & Poor’s and made a record $6 billion profit in the first quarter on $73 billion of revenue.

“The liability could be tens of billions of dollars, but I do think BP has the balance sheet capacity to be able to handle a hit like that,” said Jason Gammel, an analyst at Macquarie Securities USA Inc. in New York. “It’s too early to say it’s a takeover candidate because no one wants to own an unquantifiable liability.”

The issue here goes far beyond claims related to economic losses. The loss to the Biosphere far exceeds the market capitalization of the entire stock market. BP will have to pay for that. They will have to be bankrupted, and all of their assets seized. Anyone who stands in the way of that is not part of the solution, but part of the problem.

EFF deep links has a story about ways governments could forge SSL certificates to defeat SSL session privacy. Certainly this is now being done by NSA:

*
“Cryptography is typically bypassed, not
penetrated.”
| Adi Shamir

GOVERNMENT EXPLOITS SSL CERTIFICATES SECURITY
FLAW? Researchers released a draft paper about an inherent
browser security flaw with evidence that governments
may be able to surreptitiously spy on users’ “secure”
communications. Most modern browsers rely on certificate
authorities (CAs) to vouch for whether a secure site
is what it claims to be. But there’s evidence that
governments are being sold tools that they can use as
part of a scheme to have CAs issue certificates for
surveillance operations, enabling the undetectable
spoofing of ceratin websites or services.

During the last campaign, the candidates were falling all over themselves, trying to show how they support off- shore drilling, because off-shore drilling can be done in an environmentally sensitive way. Well, that is a lie. Off shore drilling means environmental disasters, and anyone who says different does not understand the risks involved, or he/she is a liar. Thankfully, Obama calls it like he sees it: “unprecedented disaster”

But what will happen next? That’s easy. Given the importance of this event, and how significant the British Petroleum lies are about the safety of off-shore drilling, it is almost certain that we will shortly see some leaked internal BP documents about the risks of the failed operation in the gulf. That may occur through wikileaks, or it may occur somewhere else. But it is similar to the 09f9 effect: the failure of a process dramatically increase the gravity of the documents that have questioned that process. Next after that: prosecution of BP officials.